Welcome to yet another news chapter! Again we can conclude that Attitude is released too seldom to be able to cover all happenings since last issue.

We could fill the whole mag with news and gossip, although too much of it would be dated by the time it reached you. So as usual we will focus on the most recent and important topics.

Don't forget to send us your news and gossip! (We will of course maintain your anonymity if you wish to relay news of a sensitive nature)

Now, let's get started and take a look on what has happened in the major groups, and then ending with some single news.

ARMAGEDDON

When G*P made their comeback in 2011, Sixx repeatedly tried to recruit Moloch to work for them. Moloch had other plans though, and launched a comeback of his own, bringing back Armageddon and putting out several nice releases.

Unfortunately we haven't seen anything new from Armageddon for a while, and Moloch reveals that it might stay "on ice" due to lack of time. Hopefully not for good, though.

Members: Moloch, Warlock

ARSENIC

Arsenic has been keeping busy this year with quite some art and music releases. Yazoo secured the first place in the graphics competition at BFP with his excellent piece entitled The West Is Not Too Wild. Sphinx came in second with Fearless. Both received massive applause at the party. Also at BFP their demo Too Hot To Trot reached fifth place. Memberwise JMP $FCE2, Mactron and Lotus were declared inactive, while Bitbreaker and Sextone joined up. Arsenic share many members with Oxyron, but the wind seems to be blowing in Arsenic's favor at the moment, as the double members clearly concentrate on Arsenic for the time being.

Booze competed with their very nice demo Time Machine at Datastorm, which contained the first work from Valsary for the group. Valsary joined up in the end of last year, while still staying in Elysium. Time Machine reached fourth place, and a few weeks after the party they released a tweaked and more complete version of it. They also released ScenEthetic, containing some cartoons from Jailbird, with music by Dane and code by HCL.

Members: HCL, Dane, Jailbird, RaveGuru, JackAsser, Valsary

CENSOR DESIGN

It's been less than a year since Censor Design made their comeback, after ten years of silence. It's a year they've put to good use, releasing several demos, pictures and tunes. After reaching third place with their demo What is the Matrix at Datastorm 2013 they made a grand slam at Baroque Floppy People, winning the demo compo with their massive Wonderland XII. Quite some Censor members were present at the party.

In between these parties, they also released the smaller demo Sidelined, which won the demo compo at Gubbdata. And, as if that wasn't enough, they also scored first position with their demo part made for Demo of The Year.

Memberwise, Prowler quit during summer, and Creeper joined just before BFP. While at BFP, they recruited former Defiers fame Mogwai, who will function as the group's hardware guru. Several broken Censor C64s were repaired by him during BFP, and Bob was so impressed he offered membership.

There were quite some public controversy over Censor's view on multiple membership when Axis and Yazoo joined up just as 2013 began. Both of them are now in the same three groups, and while there is no denying that allowing multiple membership is common even among top groups these days, it's another question how wise that is. The scene is clearly divided on this topic.

There's not much happening in Crest so far this year, but at least they gained Peiselulli and Reekol as members. Reekol instantly proved his worth, scoring third place in the mixed graphics competition at Arok and winning the disk cover competition there. Nice to see classic art forms such as disk covers still being honored!

It's been rather quiet from Dekadence too, at least since they released Beertime 5 at X2012. However, they gained two new members when musician Response and graphician TFT joined during the Revision 2013 party.

Britelite reveals that there might be some releases ready for Zoo 2013 in Finland later this year.

FairLight had a strong presence at Datastorm, and came packed with some releases for the compo. Wiklund, Maktone and Zabutom competed in the music competition, where Wiklund scored best, ending up on third place with Multiverse. Their massive and fine demo Too Old To Ror and Rol was produced in cooperation with Offence and Prosonix. Rumors say they were quite sure of victory, but in the end TRIAD won the competition and FLT ended up on second place. Still a very nice effort!

In late February, Sander left Focus and joined up with FairLight instead. About one month later some confusion arose when a new FairLight musician called Winks ended up on third spot in the mixed mode music competition at Revision. However, this new musician turned out to be none other than Wiklund, operating under another handle.

Bacchus attended Gubbdata in the end of April and had dinner at a pizza parlor together with some of the TRIAD members also present, sharing anecdotes and stories from days gone by.

In June, FLT, once again in coop with Offence and Prosonix, won the demo competition at Flashback 2013 with Famous Australians Volume 1. Considering there were no other entries in the C64 demo compo, we could call it a decisive victory.

Then it was back to second place again though, as FairLight+Offence+Prosonix lost out to Censor Design in the BFP demo competition. To be fair, Scrollwars is an excellent demo and it could just as well have won, but the wind just didn't blow their way this time around.

Also at BFP, Bacchus could be seen playing Rubicon together with Sixx/G*P. Was this the ultimate proof that peace between FLT and G*P will prevail?

It's been some very bad months for Focus. During the end of last year Sander left the group (and later ended up in FLT). Then also their last active coder, Lars, left as he quit the scene altogether in December.

Now, just a few weeks back, Hein left too. This leaves only three remaining members in the group. Things certainly look grim at the moment, with two years since their last release. When we approached Sander, he had some shocking things to say:

Consider them dead. I still host the Focus forum, no activity since December last year. TDJ never even reacted to my thread where I announced that I left.

Can The Dark Judge pull through and save the group, or is it really Game Over for Focus?

Members: Jeroen Tel, Marco (The Dark Judge), MC

GENESIS PROJECT

As usual, there has been quite some action from G*P lately. In the beginning of the year they recruited musician Celtic Design (who has a featured tune in this very issue of Attitude). During the summer they lost HJE, who decided to leave the group and instead focus on non-computerized music.

Once again they successfully co-organized Datastorm. Several G*P members worked hard to provide us with this next to perfect party, especially Sixx and Magervalp. Redcrab won the C64 graphics compo. Straight after the party, coder Papademos joined the G*P ranks.

In April Hedning hosted Gubbdata down in the south of Sweden, which saw some 25 sceners from groups such as Wrath Designs, FairLight, TRIAD and Censor. For a smaller party like this, the amount of nice releases and cool visitors was impressive. Uka scored silver with his Tehawanka in the graphics competition there, and so did X-Jammer in the music compo with Crooks.

In May G*P released the critically acclaimed music disk Danse Macabre with tunes from Mr.Death. As summer approached they gained a new member when Alien, who also remains in Desire and in multiplatform group Titan, joined as a graphician. Then yet another popular music disk followed, Pieces of 8-bit, with tunes from many of the active musicians in G*P.

Fast forwarding a little and G*P went on to win the demo compo at Edison 2013 with Tiki Pahu!, as conceived by Mermaid, Stinsen and Hedning. Just a few days later MCH won the sample compo at Silesia7.

Then it was time for BFP in Helsingborg, and a bunch of G*P members showed up to attend. Two tunes were handed in for the music compo. Best result among these was the tune from Stinsen that reached fifth place.

Stinsen was also involved in a bit of a debacle at BFP. Frost/Panda Design made a terrorist attack with a magic marker and drew a penis on Stinsen. This was not appreciated, and as organizer of G*P, Sixx decided to set things straight. He had a serious talk with Frost and made him apologize to Stinsen for his behavior and also promise not to behave disrespectful to any G*P members in the future. Sixx even threatened to attend the next Edison party and draw cocks all around the partyplace, unless Frost shaped up.

Just a few weeks back, the american Sysop Keymaster joined up and brought his BBS The Valley with him, of course running over telnet. The Valley used to run as HQ for Spirit back in the days, and will now function as US HQ for G*P, alongside their Euro HQ The Hidden. It's a promising sign when more groups show interest in bringing back the classic boards, and support them with callers again.

Some cracks made it out during the summer too, like Boxing Game Preview, Wolly Jumper and Sheepoid DX. Their excellent new crack intro, featuring a PETSCII dead skull and fully produced by Mermaid, has been used on some of their more recent releases.

It seems like G*P will make sure there is a Datastorm also next year, and supposedly planning for the event has already commenced.

The slackers in HT have been reasonably active this year - even active enough for us to give them their own section in this chapter! Keep it up boys, we like your stuff!

HT came to Datastorm with some disks in their backpack, handing in several contributions for the competitions. Somehow, birds seem to be on the mind of HT these days. AcidT*rroreast won the mixed graphics compo at DS with a nice Fagel (bird).

Linde and Goto8o handed in one tune each, but scored quite low in the compo. Their demo Dansa in was another story, though. Put together by Mathman, Goto8o and AcidT*rroreast, this PETSCII demo came in sixth place and was very well received by the audience. Also a second demo, Algae, was handed in, which ended up on place nine.

Frantic was of course involved in organizing Baroque Floppy People, and HT had some treats prepared for the compo there too. AcidT*rroreast won the bronze medal in the regular graphics compo with an amazing PETSCII piece entitled Skal. And again PETSCII, but this time in the form of a demo, the third place in the demo compo was awarded to 20 Years Is Nothing. A glorious celebration of Hack n'Trade turning 20 years old and a very solid production.

We've heard rumors about negotiations between HT and Judas Design for a possible future crossover. Both groups have a strong focus on PETSCII, so that is probably the reason for the negotiations in the first place. Time will tell if something will materialize.

To our delight it seems like Hitmen have picked up pace again. After their second place in the X2012 demo compo with Artphosis, we've seen several new releases from them. Both Peacemaker and Groepaz seem to be back in action, actually. Crowd Pleaser scored third place in the mixed demo competition at Revision and contained some neat ideas. They also contributed with a part for Demo Of The Year.

In addition to this, we've seen some tunes from Peacemaker and Xiny6581 as well as graphics from Death.

After Firehawk collaborated with Joe on the compo picture Plaisir du Multiplex at Gubbdata (which won the competition), Joe decided to join Hoaxers - while staying in Wrath Designs and Crest as well.

Then Hoaxers teamed up with Wrath and crafted the REU demo Frontier which went on to win the mixed demo compo at Solskogen in the middle of July. They also took home first and second places in both the mixed graphics and mixed music competition, so it's safe to say that Hoaxers dominated Solskogen this time around!

We are still waiting for the 100% version of Protogeo since the 80% version was released at X2012. A good demo, but the massive delay points to internal problems. Will the full version ever be released? We were unable to get any answers from Glance on this topic in time for this issue's deadline.

Laxity have continued to mainly put out cracks, but they also contributed with a demo part for the Demo of The Year 2013 coop demo. Some of the more recent cracks worth mentioning are the retail versions of Assembloids, and the NTSC fixed Wolly Jumper. A new crack intro was conceived and used on Wolly Jumper, featuring an old but very nice logo from their inactive member Skyhawk. Another noteworthy release was the full price game Stalingrad Campaign with documentation and map. Although fully in Basic, it was without doubt an interesting release of a rare game which they picked up on eBay.

Their latest release, Flin Flon, boasted yet another new crack intro entitled Laxity Unchained. This one was coded by Goat with graphics by DanDee.

Laxity also held the 3 Color Logo Competition with over 100 contributions from different sceners, as well as the Font Creation Competition which generated no less than 54 entries.

Members: DanDee, Didi, Goat, O'Dog, Secret Man

N0STALGIA

N0stalgia have continued to release fine jewel versions of older games during the latest couple of months. Some of their releases have been adapted for the EasyFlash cartridge. The only downside to this is that there is still not a massive user base of people owning EF carts for their real machines.

Their EF release of Pirates! is without doubt the best version of this game ever available, and a reason alone for more people to by EF carts, though.

Other noteworthy releases as of late are the 101% versions of Motor Massacre/Road Raiders as well as Arcade Fruit Machine.

Offence is an extremely active group, gracing us with a constant flow of music, graphics and demos. Granted, most of their demos are coop efforts, but with their talented line-up of members we'll hopefully see more solo stuff in the future too.

So far this year, Offence have produced three demos. Two of them together with FairLight and Prosonix, and thus already covered in the FairLight section of this chapter. The solo effort was called Summer of 64, which came in on second place at the demo compo at Solskogen.

Scarzix, won the music competition at BFP 2013 with a splendid tune named Da Cheese Cut.

Memberwise, Offence have again picked up some new recruits. First, Macx joined in as public relations manager while still remaining in Onslaught. Then the above mentioned Scarzix (who had previously been inactive for quite a while) joined up with them in May, followed by Alfatech. During the summer, also Pantaloon joined in, who of course also remain in FairLight. Pal's girlfriend became a member too under the handle MELO, and will function as a graphician for the group.

The recruitment of Pantaloon might at first seem natural, considering the many coop efforts involving Offence, FairLight and Prosonix. However, it also raises questions about the future of these groups. Preserving uniqueness while sharing key members and constantly doing coops together could prove difficult. Granted, this is surely a trend throughout the scene these days, and nothing that just applies to Offence.

Onslaught is one of those groups who always provide quality in a stable flow. Release frequency varies at times, but you can count on them being there, through thick and thin. So, what have the boys in Onslaught been up to then?

Macx and Zzap69 represented them at Datastorm, where they also participated with their tech demo called Demolicious (party version). This demo featured code by Algorithm, music by Sonic and graphics by Cons and Joe and was the result of 30-40 hours of work on C64 and PC side (converters, encoders, etc.). The second side mainly consists of a new method of graphic conversion, resulting in high quality interlaced images.

However, the entry was disqualified by Genesis Project with the statement "no member participating in the demo itself being present at the party". Onslaught protested this decision, as Macx was helping with testing the demo at the party venue itself, but G*P did not budge.

Cons gained the silver medal in the mixed graphics compo at @Party 2013 (held in the United States) with his entry multi-color picture Vihma. He also reached second place at the mixed graphics compo at Nordlicht 2013 in Germany, this time with his double-screen FLI entry Mind Collapse.

The Flashback party in Sydney, Australia was again a great success. This year, for the first time, Onslaught were officially behind the organization together with their friends in Defame. Flashback 2013 had 64 entries, further information about the event can be found at auscene.org.

The group have continued to be active in the first release scene with a rule of quality over quantity, putting out such titles as Berzerk Redux Special Edition, Sir Ababol Cartridge and Guns 'n' Ghosts. Most recently we saw the release of the full version of Warriors, which was 101% bugfixed by The Ignorance, who seem to be back in action again!

Rumors on the streets of scene town claim that Jazzcat is planning to change the first release rules for The List in Vandalism News. If the rumors turn out to be true, let's hope the rules are not changed in such a way that public support weakens for this scene institution. We will probably know for sure when the next VN is out.

Currently Onslaught are working on some demos for Syntax 2013 in November. Vandalism News #60 - Diamond Edition is also scheduled for November, but with old outfit as Crimson is still not finished with the new outfit. Work is also being done on Recollection #4 and a new website.

As everyone knows, Oxyron won the demo competition at X2012 in the end of last year, but just a few days later some membership shuffles occurred. First DJ Gruby left the group, staying only in Arsenic. This triggered Yazoo to clean up the memberstatus a bit, and so he retired TCH and RRR. Yazoo and RRR did not quite agree on this, though. For the next couple of weeks, RRR re-added Oxyron as his group on CSDb, while Yazoo deleted it. As RRR now have decided to quit the scene, the matter can be said to have been solved by itself.

Curious about why DJ Gruby decided to leave, we decided to let him explain the matter himself:

Probably many of you have wondered, why the heck did DJ Gruby leave Oxyron, one of the coolest groups in the C64 scene, especially at the moment of their greatest glory after releasing the killer trackmo "Coma Light XIII", and winning X2012 demo competition?

It might appear as a very disappointing explanation to some of you, but there was actually no controversy behind my decision to leave Oxyron at all. As you may know, not everything that happens in the universe needs a purpose. Of course there were some consequences, like enforcing dedication to just one group for example (as a side note, I am really fond of this rule and I truly admire groups like TRIAD that are able to do both: keep morale high and maintain solid loyalty of their members), which would then be Arsenic.

The initial idea was great: giving more room to concentrate on making demos. And since I would never dare to release my lame productions under the Oxyron label, that would be perfectly fine to present my skills increasing through time in Arsenic. "Yeah, uhm... Right..." - you might mutter, wondering whether all my demos released since then went unnoticed or am I simply hallucinating here. Well, you know, not everything goes as planned, and instead of coding super cool demo effects I dedicated my spare time to implement this diskmag engine you are browsing right now.

Having said that, I hope to continue my quest of mastering assembly programming, although I am not promising to release anything particular, as Niels Bohr once said: "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." And I really don't know, what will the future bring.

It seems like Oxyron has gone into a bit of a coma themselves after the climax of Coma Light XIII. Valuable members have been declared inactive, like Veto and also Yazoo, who still claims to be the organizer of the group though. Most probably he aims to concentrate more on his membership in Censor Design and Arsenic at the moment.

Still, not all is bleak. Oxyron participated with a part in Demo of the Year 2013, and they recently recruited the graphicians Sphinx and Death as well as the musician Devilock. Not that bad for a group considered inactive for the time being.

In the beginning of the summer Panda got reinforced with the musician Qdor. Panda's sound department have indeed been busy during the year. Best results so far have been Samhalls Finest by new member Qdor and Fegolhuzz, a tune that ended up winning the mixed music competition at Edison. Qdor also took home the third spot in the BFP music compo with his Frozen Yoghurt, while Fegolhuzz ended up on fourth place with Saturday Night Beaver.

Demo wise, they released the very nice Edison 2013 Invitation, called Digital Underground. It ended up on 8th place at Revision mixed demo compo but might very well have deserved a higher ranking.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the founders of the Amiga group Scoopex started out on the C64, in a group named Megaforce. Now Scoopex are set on starting a C64 section since some of their members have expressed interest in doing stuff on the C64. However, since no Scoopex coders as of yet have expressed interest to program the C64, Scoopex are searching for a good coder to join.

We asked Photon for a statement, and got the following reply:

On the C64 we're looking for a coder who can compete with the best and can show some nice stuff for our C64 musicians to make magic by and knows what he needs and can tell us. Certainly we can also see gfx artist(s) coming on board as needs increase, and further down the road, certainly more active C64 coders, musicians and gfx artists.

Even though some of our coders could shift focus to C64, this is an effort on my part to get someone who focuses exclusively on the C64 and wants to compete with the big C64 groups. This begins now, a conscious move to form a well-rounded C64 section of Scoopex.

Current members of the Scoopex C64 section are Magnar and Mr.Death. Ne7 will not be participating in the C64 section, to honour the one C64 group only policy in TRIAD.

Our Greek member Archimedes decided to quit the scene just before 2013 started, and in early summer also Swedish member CMP sadly decided to leave the scene behind. Reason was too much other things going on in their lives in both cases.

Still, TRIAD made a very strong start in 2013 by winning the demo competition at Datastorm 2013 with Revolved, in fierce competition with some of the very best groups on the scene. The TRIAD members responsible for this great demo were Ruk, Abaddon, Iopop, Icon, Tao, Houbba and Twoflower. Dane/Booze Design participated on the northern Revolved meetings and made the exclusive soundtrack for us.

In addition to this, Twoflower grabbed the silver medal in the graphics compo with his piece St Joaquin. No less than 13 TRIAD members showed up at Datastorm, making it one massive party for all of us.

Fatzone was put to rest when Malmix and Pezac joined TRIAD instead, after some final negotiations with Malmix during Datastorm. In March, Finnish scener Vent joined up with the mummyship, previously being a member of Damage under the handle Venturus.

In the end of April Iopop, King Fisher, Bepp, Itch and Taper attended Gubbdata in Lund (south of Sweden). We released the oldschool demo Circadin (ended up on 3rd place) and tunes from Abaddon, King Fisher and Vent. In addition, Vent scored bronze with his graphics contribution, Babu.

Then it was time for Baroque Floppy People in Helsingborg, held in early August with TRIAD as one of the organizing groups. Taper, Tao, Itch, Iopop and Cash represented TRIAD at the party, where our demo Solaris ended up on fourth place in the demo competition. Solaris was coded by Tao and Icon, with graphics by Twoflower and music by Ne7.

As this was not enough party wize, TRIAD are involved in the organizing of two more parties later this year. First up is GREP 2013, which will be held On the 6-8th of September in Sk0vde, Sweden. This smaller party is arranged by Malmix and Pezac, together with Nature (Amiga/PC) and Traktor (MSX/Amiga).

Naturally our neighbours in Finland need some party loving too! Zoo 2013 will be held in Viiala on the 10th of November and is organised by Vent and other Finnish friends. More information on both these parties can be found on the TRIAD homepage.

In celebration of Abaddon's new version of Cheesecutter (2.5.0), TRIAD decided to host a music competition entitled Release The Cheese, organised by Vent. Twelve contributions were handed in, and then compiled into a music collection by Ruk, Romppainen and Vent. This collection should be out any time now.

A few cracks have made it out so far this year as well, most notably Radar Simulation complete with massive documentation translated from German, and Lemmings [unofficial] preview which was heavily shorted.

Tao and Twoflower competed in the Font Creation Competition, and Twoflower scored second place with his font entitled Sardonic.

As for the future it's business as usual and work commence on several projects. Stay tuned...

TRSI recruited the coder Spider Jerusalem who joined in late March. They managed to win the mixed competition at Revision 2013 with a neat 4K intro entitled 4Krawall, produced by Peiselulli, Spider Jerusalem and Street Tuff.

Continuing their streak of releases, TRSI put out a whole bunch of productions at Nordlicht in the end of July. First out was Zeropage Gravity, which ended up on third place, created by Cons and outsider Virgill.

Next up was Natura Morta, scoring silver, which was coded by Street Tuff, with music by Linus and graphics by Cons. Also, Cons'es contribution for the mixed graphics competition came in on second place.

Still not done at Nordlicht, there was one more release to go! TRSI have been one of the few groups embracing the C64DTV, putting out some beutiful art on that platform. So, with a bit of assistance from The Dreams, the DTV demo Outtakes was released (fifth place in the mixed demo compo). Work on this was done by Benson, Peiselulli, Devilock, Cons as well as Hene and Mis of The Dreams.

Atlantis made a bit of a comeback last year, and now in late August they released two tunes and the demo Cyber Dream which consists of a blend between new and old material. Current members are Agemixer, Dr Science and Robocop. Hopefully we will see more from Atlantis again so we can include them more regularly in this chapter.

Delysid gained a new member when Swedish musician Mythus joined up. They released the small production Welcome Mythus! to celebrate this occasion.

Wacek/Arise won the Font Creation Competition with his font entitled Like Razors Thru Flesh.

The Ancients have been working on their SID-Fixer and have now begun taking non binding pre-orders. It allows mounting of one old and one new SID at the same time, which then can be switched between either manually or via software. It also contains digi-fix for 8580 SID and protects the SID chips installed. No soldering required. Contact Devia if interested, devia[at]ancients[dot]dk.

Zardax joined Artline Designs while still staying in Origo Dreamline (not that Origo produced anything for like 15 years though). Artline Designs released a small demo called Reunited at their meeting in February, most work was done by Flex.

Lotharek is currently developing a new turbo card for the C64, called F7 Turbo. The card is based on a 20 MHz WDC65C816 CPU, just as the Super CPU from CMD. There is yet no info that suggests what kind of compatibility we can expect with programs written for the Super CPU though. Visit Lotharek at www.lotharek.pl.

Dark Vibrations, a previously unreleased music collection from Carcass, was rescued from bad disks and is now available on CSDb.

Samar released a lot of stuff at Silesia 7. Their demo B-Land Scrapbook scored silver, while the 4K intro One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won the 4K compo. One tune and some compo pictures were released as well.

Encore/Undone scored second place at Gubbdata with his neat demo Gubbplasma. We hope to see more from him in the future!

Stormfront and Tadpole are still keeping Excess alive even if releases are far inbetween. Two latest cracks were Super Mario Bros Preview and Sven-Goran Penalty Trainer Preview. Current memberstatus is Stormfront, Tadpole and RHX.

Mahoney has launched the Scrolltext preservation project, collecting scroll texts from various productions and preserving them on www.scrolltexts.com - check it out!

LFT has been keeping busy, releasing several nice productions. His demo Shards of Fancy reached sixth place at Revision 2013, and he also released a trackmo system and some VSP tools.